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16.2% of Boulder County kids live below poverty line, report says

By John Fryar

Staff Writer

Posted:
02/04/2016 06:55:00 PM MST

Updated:
02/04/2016 06:56:33 PM MST

The Status of Children in Boulder County 2015

What: The Boulder County Movement for Children's latest annual report tracking trends about the economic well-being, health, education, safety and protection of the county's children is available online through a link at bit.ly/1oaKHVw

More than 10,000 Boulder County children under age 18 were in households whose family incomes were at or below federal poverty levels in 2014, representatives of Boulder County Movement for Children told county commissioners on Thursday.

Researcher Stephanie Greenberg, the author of the 2015 "Status of Children in Boulder County" report, told commissioners that in 1990, an estimated 9.3 percent of the county's children lived in below-poverty-income households.

In 2014, the most recent year for which figures were available by the time the latest report was completed, an estimated 16.2 percent of Boulder County's children were in below-poverty households, Greenberg said, a 74 percent increase from the 1990 level.

Greenberg, who has been tracking trends and producing the Status of Children in Boulder County reports for 20 years, said the 2015 federally set poverty level, which is used to determine eligibility for a variety of social services programs, was set at incomes of $24,250 or less for a family of four.

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"That income is not nearly high enough for economic self sufficiency in Boulder County," according to the written status report.

Greenberg said that under a self-sufficiency standard prepared for the Colorado Center on Law and Policy, a Boulder County family of two adults, an infant and a pre-schooler needs an $86,644 income to meet basic needs, more than three times the official federal poverty level.

Movement for Children's 2015 report also said that "poverty is not equally distributed among the county's children."

The 2014 poverty rate among Boulder County's Hispanic children and their families was 39.5 percent, almost five times the 8.5 percent rate among white non-Hispanic children. The poverty rate for female-headed families with children younger than 18 was 30.8 percent, compared to a 6.2 percent poverty rate for married-couple families with children.

Greenberg told the commissioners that many other Boulder County families with children don't fall into the official federal poverty-level category, they're "just one paycheck away" from poverty.

In 2014, the report said, "15.6 percent of Boulder County's children lived at the edge of poverty," with family incomes between 100 percent and 200 percent of federal poverty level,

The report identified several "encouraging trends," such as one that found that 97.1 percent of the county's children were covered by some level of public or private health insurance in 2014 and another noting that high school graduation rates had increased in both the Boulder Valley and St. Vrain Valley school districts between 2010 and 2014.

However, the report also listed a number of "areas of concern," such as the high costs of child care centers. Between 1994 and 2014, child care costs in Boulder County rose well above the rate of inflation over that 20-year period, the report said.

The report did not specific recommendations about policies or programs to address those concerns, something Greenberg said afterward "has never been our intent." She said

Commissioner Deb Gardner said that while the 2015 Status of Children report highlighted a number of items that she said were "particularly disturbing," she encouraged Boulder County Movement for Children, an affiliate of the YWCA of Boulder County, and Movement's nonprofit and government agency partners, to continue their annual trends tracking reports.

"We can't quit," Gardner said, "until things get better."

Things can get better for the county's children with "appropriate public investment," Greenberg said. "It can be done."

Movement for Children's steering committee members include representatives from such organizations and agencies as Boulder County Public Health, Boulder County's Community Services Department, Boulder County Head Start, the Boulder Valley School District, Voices for Children CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates), and the Early Childhood Council of Boulder County.

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